The unwritten British constitution as it affects Civil Service accountability – especially to Parliament – is going through an incremental, but very significant, change, argues Professor Colin Talbot. At the heart of the British constitution lies the concept of separation of the administrative elite from the political elite. This is very different from other countries […]
Civil Service Accountability to the Public part II
In the second of three blogs Martin Stanley examines whether senior officials should be more accountable – especially to MPs – for the advice that they give to Ministers. This is the fourth post in our series on the Civil Service. How would officials react to greater public scrutiny? Most of them, I suspect, would […]
Continuity and Change in the Civil Service II: How SPADs and Tsars are changing the Whitehall landscape
The UK has had a clear dividing line between its political and administrative leadership. In the third post in our series examining the current state of the Civil Service, Professor Colin Talbot argues that the rise of the SPAD and the Tsar is changing this. Special advisors – or SPADs, to use their common acronym […]
How racism harms health
Lifetime experiences of racism damage the health of ethnic minorities from before birth until death, writes Dr Laia Bécares. Racism is toxic for health. This can be taken literally, proven by a vast environmental justice literature that shows how some ethnic minorities are more likely than the white majority population to live within close […]
Civil Service Accountability to the Public
In the second of our series of posts exploring the corridors of power in Whitehall, former senior civil servant and public sector chief executive Martin Stanley discusses how we are governed and the tensions between the needs of Ministers, MPs and the wider public. The electorate clearly believe that ‘the Westminster Village’ is incompetent and/or […]
Continuity and Change in the Civil Service I: Is “Sir Humphrey” history?
Over the coming weeks Policy@Manchester will run a series of blogs exploring the role of the Civil Service and how it works with Government Ministers. In the first, Colin Talbot explores whether “Sir Humphrey” is no more. Has the Civil Service moved away from the image of the public school, Oxbridge, pale, male and stale […]
Drug policy: Time for change?
After four people are suspected to have been killed by tablets that may have been thought to be ecstasy over the festive season, Michael Donmall, of the National Drug Evidence Centre at The University of Manchester writes about the dangers of keeping recreational drugs illegal and calls for controlled availability of tested products. Recent deaths […]
Policing the North
Last month Metropolitan Police commissioner Bernard Hogan-Howe called for fewer police forces in the UK as cuts in public spending change the way that out services have to operate . Here Michael Dawson, of devolution campaign group Campaign for the North says the region should have a single police force; There are many merits to Bernard Hogan-Howe’s recent […]
Public policy and the hegemony of happiness
Policy fetishism about GDP is being replaced by an unthinking devotion to simplistic happiness indicators, warns Annie Austin. “In a decade’s time we’re going to be using happiness as the sole basis for judging the impact of public policy.” So stated Paul Dolan recently in the opening sequence of ITV’s Tonight programme, entitled ‘Is Britain […]
Time to ditch GDP as a measure of economic well-being
There is nothing inevitable or ‘natural’ about using GDP to measure the economy. The Office for National Statistics has embarked on a journey toward a more rounded assessment of economic well-being, argues Professor Diane Coyle. Just before Christmas, the Office for National Statistics took a giant step, in its normal low key manner: it published […]
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